A dear friend of mine's daughter ran off with her boyfriend yesterday. As I've tossed and turned tonight, worrying about her and her parents, I keep praying for her and them. Finally I surrendered and got up, figuring my husband might get some sleep that way.
It seems that we've all run off, in some way, at some point in our lives. I remember one such moment, where it seemed I was standing on the edge of a knife, deciding which side I was going to jump off. I recollect a warm, late May evening in a parking lot at college, staring up at the second floor dorm where my friend was standing in the window. She had opted, at that climactic moment, not to run off with me. We were to join our boyfriends and go camping out in the wilderness that last night of school. Forbidden and dangerous. I had a choice to make. I could go back to the locked dorm, ring the doorbell and get chided for being a few minutes late for curfew. Or I could run down the hill and face even bigger choices in the darkness with my boyfriend. In a modern movie, it would seem an obvious and romantic conclusion: choose love. Live! In reality, it could have ruined my life.
I ran down into the twilight. The rest of the night was a virtual fight with myself and with him. Our 2-year relationship was fraught with break-ups, fights, dreams and indecision. He wanted me to marry him. I knew, somewhere in there, that we weren't right for each other. I questioned his commitment to God. He questioned my butterfly nature. I wanted him to be a man of faith. He wanted to keep me, alone, in his gilded cage. At one point in that critical witching hour, he threatened to rape me so that I might get pregnant and feel obligated to marry him. And there I was, stupidly spending the night with someone like that and expecting him to honor my chastity. I cried out to God and somehow got through that blackness without being violated. Morning came. He dropped me at the campus with us both streaming tears. I knew that the only way I could get away from him was to go far away, to go back home and stay there. I cocooned myself like a child with my parents, bruised and broken. A month later, I cracked and spilled to them all that had happened. I spent the next year working during the day and going to a local college at night. I was numb, lonely. So lonely. One evening, almost a year to the day I left the other college, as I was walking across the campus, a brief spring rain caught me far from shelter. It was over in a minute, then the sun shone. Raindrops sparkled on the trees and in the air. The grass was neon and the birds were shrieking with joy. I thanked God for the first time in a year, for all the things good and bad that had conspired. In an instant, I realized that I was free. I was no longer in a cage or under threat. I could be who I wanted to be and who God made me to be. Funny, how you can be completely enslaved and not even know it. Funny, how you can rashly make choices that seem like you are choosing life when what you are choosing is serfdom, and probably to your own passions.
I've seen my own children wrestle with crossroads, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. The right choices don't always mean the safe ones, and if we live our lives just trying to keep from getting hurt, then we'll never truly live. One of my favorite quotes is by Theodore Roosevelt: "Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure....than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
The world would have us believe that everything we do should be monitored by our heart. "The heart wants what the heart wants" -- and therefore the heart should get everything it wants, regardless of what is right or wrong. It must be right, if that's what my heart is telling me. But I've seen lives destroyed, children ruined, testimonies dashed, mayhem and murder because of people following their "hearts." Ole' Teddy's quote mentions daring mighty things, winning glorious triumphs, not holing up in the mud with a handsome pig. There is a higher road. I would have never believed, that morning I walked away from that boy, what God had in mind for me. Windows of heaven and all that, mixed with the muck and mire of earth, but still heavenly. He is good, showing love and mercy to those who will cry out to Him. And often even when we don't. Praying for my friend's daughter tonight...
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